Beyond lexical units: Enriching wordnets with phrasets

Abstract

In this paper we present a proposal to extend WordNet-like lexical databases by adding phrasets, i.e. sets of free combinations of words which are recurrently used to express a concept (let's call them recurrent free phrases). Phrasets are a useful source of information for different NLP tasks, and particularly in a multilingual environment to manage lexical gaps. Two experiments are presented to check the possibility of acquiring recurrent free phrases from dictionaries and corpora.